Over the course of five seasons we've seen a mild-mannered, underemployed chemistry teacher turn into a meth-cooking, myth-making super villain who'll execute a colleague in cold blood simply for talking back to him. (RIP Mike Ehrmantraut.)

In that regard, Walter White has channeled Al Pacino's iconic Scarface psychopath, Tony Montana. But thanks to the NRA and America's gun culture, Walter White diverged from the archetypical gangster in one important way: He needs a bigger gun.

The most iconic line in Brian DePalma's 1983 remake of Scarface comes at the end of the movie as Tony Montana grabs a machine gun and shouts defiantly at the drug cartel hit squad: "Say hello to my little friend!"

Tony Montana's "little friend" is a Colt AR-15 tarted up with a fake grenade launcher. In a 1983 film like Scarface, the sight of an AR-15 was chilling, the sort of weapon that only a sociopath like Montana would use to try to mow down a team of assassins single handedly.

In 2013, America's view of that gun--and perhaps the gun--has changed radically. According to the NRA, the AR-15 is the best selling weapon in the United States. You can buy an AR-15 style weapon at Wal Mart. You can go to Youtube and you can find a seven-year old firing an AR-15, Indeed, a sizable percentage of the Breaking Bad audience no doubt has an AR-15 style weapon sitting in a gun cabinet across from their flat screen televisions.

The AR-15 is the gun that's at the epicenter of the gun control debate. Opponents, citing its use in mass murders in Aurora and Newtown, call it an assault weapon and have argued for it to be banned. Proponents call it a legitimate hunting and target shooting rifle. It's a divisive piece of weaponry. But it's mere presences no longer strikes fear in the average TV viewer.

For all these reasons, Gilligan and his team of writers decided to steer clear of the AR-15 when completing Walt's descent into Scarface. (While drug dealer Tuco Salamanca uses a similar MRA1 rifle in his shootout with DEA agent Hank Schrader early in season two, Breaking Bad has generally killed off characters with either handguns or wildly unconventional weaponry, ranging from an exploding tortoise to a speeding Aztek to a booby trapped wheelchair.)

As we head into the final eight episodes, Walter "Scarface" White chooses a very different little friend: the M60

The M60 is used by special ops forces like Navy Seals. The 24-pound weapon shoots 550 rounds per minute, with a range of up to 1,100 meters. "It's a squad multiplier." says former Navy Seal David Hallaran. " If you're going against [superior] numbers you can use this weapons system to make you seem like you're a lot bigger than you really are."

It's just about the most fearsome gun that can be handled by one man--the turn of the millennium equivalent of Tony Montana's little friend.

"You go to the trouble of buying an M60 machine gun in a Denny's bathroom, you probably have a pretty pressing and severe use for it at hand," Gilligan told Rolling Stone.

What's just as important as the kind of gun Walter White gets is how he gets it. And that's where an illegal gun dealer named , played brilliantly by Jim Beaver of Deadwood and Justified fame, enters the story. Lawson only appears in two scenes, but he plays an important role in the series, as a kind of embodiment of America's gun culture.